Digital documents, files, and media may all be easily copied. Such copying of information may not be immediately apparent on its face; however, such copying can often prove to be problematic if it is initially undetected, but later discovered by a party having legal rights in the copied information.
To take an example, unlike in traditional software development environments where a single entity controls the entire development of a software element, in collaborative development environments, the software elements being developed are shared among a variety of entities. Accordingly, when one develops software in a collaborative environment, copying is more difficult to detect. As such, the risk that the legal rights of another entity will be infringed, for example by developers illegally importing the other entity's constituent software elements into their aggregated software product, is increased.
An entity providing a constituent software element can, for example, form licenses that explicitly set forth the rights, obligations, restrictions, and/or prohibitions governing the constituent software element's use within an aggregated software product. While this may alleviate some of the uncertainty associated with incorporating a constituent software element into an aggregated software product, collaborative developers nevertheless still have an interest in tracking the use and/or copying of constituent software elements to further mitigate the risk of infringing another's legal rights in the constituent software element.